


Oceans (Breakdown)

by Lilmizzhugable13



Series: Behind the Scenes [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Requested, breakdown of my works, enjoy the musings of my mind, i just basically rant about the writing process
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 19:02:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15540912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilmizzhugable13/pseuds/Lilmizzhugable13
Summary: A breakdown of how I wrote "Oceans" in my Ben/Mal collection.





	Oceans (Breakdown)

I always carry around a little notepad with me that I call Ralph. I work in the office of International Business and Finance at my school, and as a student employee, I don’t do much. I just make copies, fix printer jams, and all that jazz. Usually, I just stay in the back desk and wait for my boss to call me for an errand. It’s quiet in the back, so my mind wanders to ideas. They’re mostly snippets of a scene or a theme or dialogue that I try to develop when I get home.

That’s how this fic started. On a particularly slow day, I wrote down:

_“___ wakes with the taste of salt on ___ lips”_

And yes, I am a fill-in-the-blank writer. Whenever I don’t know how to finish a sentence or how to get from Point A to Point B in a paragraph, I just throw in a shit load of underscores and finish a part I do know. On Ralph, I make it a rule to eliminate names/pronouns, mostly because I don’t want to confine a piece to a specific character/gender. I wouldn’t be able to see all the possibilities this fic could become.

I went home afterwards, ate, cried a bit over student debt (I’m a freshman and already $10,000 in debt. Kill me), and then tried to develop any ideas I came up with through the day. I only had that one line, though, so I was kind of going through a funk. I really had no idea what this could become, and the furthest I got before I decided to call it a night was:

_“___ wakes with the taste of salt on ___ lips and screams”_

Yes, I was beyond frustrated.

The next day, I was off from work and done with finals, so I stayed in my bed and opened my laptop. I have a bunch of other unfinished fics on my google drive that need to be worked on, but that one line was practically killing me, so I stared at that line and stared thinking.

Why does the character taste salt on their lips? My first thought was tears. They were crying.

Okay, so why are they crying?

And that got me nowhere, so I stared to think where this fic could fit into, and that was literally every fandom on Earth, so I thought of what I wanted to write. I decided on Descendants since I hadn’t uploaded my Follower collection in a while, so I got:

_“He wakes with the taste of salt on his lips and screams”_

But then I realized I had written in Ben’s point of view in the last fic. While it’s not a specific rule I have, I like to keep point of views balanced, so I changed the pronouns.

_“She wakes with the taste of salt on her lips and screams”_

A lot of ideas popped into my head, but there was one sentence that stood out:

_“The grit and isolation of the Isle did not destroy her, and neither will the dreams of a monster.”_

From there, I started getting a basic outline. Mal is having dreams about a monster that makes her wake up at night screaming and crying. I stared to think of the setting.

Did I want it to be an AU? No, I’ve already written that for the past two fics. Canon setting, okay. So Mal’s in a bed and screams. Does Ben wake up and comfort her? No, that’s a little too basic. So Evie?

I played around with that idea a bit. I love Mal and Evie’s friendship, but it’s something I’ve largely ignored in this collection for some reason. In my Deive collection, their friendship plays a larger role in some fics, but I never thought to include that element in this collection. The closest I got to it was in “Chains Part II” where Mal kills the guard to protect Evie and allows Ben to give her information so Auradon will have a reason to pardon her, but it’s not really enough for me, so as I said, I played around with the idea, but I hit a snag.

How does Ben come into the picture? Does he “take her off of Evie’s hands” figuratively? Literally? But how would he even know about Mal screaming awake? Does Evie call him? No, that wouldn’t make sense. She would try to help Mal, not throw her to Ben.

No matter what angle I tried to see this, it wouldn’t work with Evie helping her, but I didn’t want Ben to help her either. I already wrote fics where they share a bed, and if I wrote about Ben helping Mal through some issue while in bed, it would be too much like my second fic in this collection, “Today.” That’s how the first line turned into:

_“She wakes with the taste of salt on her lips and screams in her head.”_

And I liked how that came out. As a first sentence, I would set up the inner conflict that would be the main problem, and, of course, every inner conflict needs to spill out, so I needed to write that scene. That’s where I decided Ben would come in. I typed down the first things that came to my mind:

_“She’s seen it over and over again, the blood and the crying and the bruises and the breaking and the screaming_

_He’s by her side instantly_

_‘Sorry’_

_‘It’s okay’ ‘Mal?’_

_Her ears are ringing.”_

That’s when I started to notice the similarities between this fic and “Shower.” After a while, angst tends to blend together to where the same tropes are repeated. Everyone’s guilty of it – me included as you can see. That’s why betas are so useful. I don’t have one (I’m too awkward to ask someone to become one for me, and honestly, I’m so critical of my own writing that I function as a self-beta), but I was a beta for a few writers before I became an author myself. Betas are the real MVP y’all. Just saying. If you don’t have a beta, I suggest finding one, and if you already have one, appreciate them. They’re precious little nuggets.

Anyways, I found myself going back to a specific trope: the haunted-by-her-mother trope. It’s present in many of published fics (Today, Shower, Chains, Fourteen, and most of the drafts sitting in my TBC folder), so I was adamant that the monster in this fic would NOT be her mother. The next obvious choice was Uma which made me think about the ocean. Salt.

Eureka.

From that point, I began writing, but I came across a couple of problems.

_“It’s odd, dreaming of her. It’s not like her normal dreams – which are more like watching an old, broken recording – but more like she is her, feeling both sensation and emotion though her. She hates it, knowing she has control over every aspect of her, including her subconscious.”_

First problem was obvious; the pronouns. At this point, I had no idea what the format of this fic was going to be. I didn’t think I would do the present-past-present thing. I honestly believed I was going to analyze and breakdown Uma and Mal’s entire past. With that being said, I noticed that if I was going to write this fic with Uma as Mal’s monster, then it would get confusing with the female pronouns. And yes, I know I could’ve switched pronouns with names to make it clearer, but there’s moments where that’s just excessive and awkward. Am I the only one who thinks that?

Second problem, I thought this wasn’t going to be relevant to Ben. Mal and Uma are friends turned enemies, and I thought that friendship was too one-dimensional that I couldn’t bring Ben and Mal’s two-dimensional relationship into this. And yes, I suppose you can argue I could’ve brought up Uma spelling Ben as a bridge between the two relationships, but that was so basic. Don’t get me wrong, I will eventually write something like that or something that would breach that subject, but to do so in this fic was lazy. It was the easy way, and easy should never be involved in writing.

These problems didn’t bother me, though, because the solution was simple: make Harry the monster. It was almost too easy – which was a bad sign.

I didn’t know how to bring Harry into the picture without making it seem like Mal was still feeling something for him. I will eventually write something like that, but I really wanted to focus on Ben and Mal because oh my god my last two fics were depressing. I needed something happy not only for y’all but for me and my sanity. But at this point, I honestly didn’t think it would happen, so I jotted down random phrases:

_“All she saw was a wheel, a hook, and the horizon._

_She’s never been to the lake, never been on a boat… all she sees is Harry and his ship in the ocean._

_She needs water.”_

_She needs water_ was going to be the ending sentence. I figured if I was going to make this a MalxHarry fic, I might as well go big. Everything’s bigger in Texas, after all (by the way I’m from Texas). I wasn’t going to write that Mal loved Harry but that she needed him, that she’s ALWAYS needed him. That’s where the idea of going into the past came from.

_“It was what he represented that first drew Mal to him. She was 12, too old to have her first boyfriend, especially when people like Evie already had seven by then. He was suitable – weird enough to be intriguing, insane enough to be respected, handsome enough to overlook all of his other qualities. And he singled her out, chose her when no one even dared to look at the daughter of Maleficent. That was as close to love a villain would ever get.”_

The first paragraph in that section came easily to me. And that last sentence? I mean, not to pat myself on the back, but damn was that a good sentence (confidence is an important part of writing. Be proud of your fics!). It was pretty simple writing that section down.

Another rule I have is sentence balance. I won’t repeat a certain sentence structure in the same paragraph unless it’s for dramatic/aesthetic purposes. I feel like repeating structure just makes the paragraph boring, unoriginal, and annoying. While I was writing this section, I utilized choppy, incomplete sentences (which extended to the rest of my fic).

 _“_ … _they challenged her. Dared her. Held her under the current. Swept her into his tidal waves. Drowned her.”_

I felt like it was necessary to be this abrupt, especially since I was writing a memory. Whenever you remember things, it doesn’t come back as perfectly as many write it to be. You forget things, realize things, and the memory tends to run through your head. It’s not purple prose. Sometimes it works and going into intrinsic detail helps characterize the protagonist and it’s genius, but most of the time, it’s just used as a way for the author to show off their writing. Being choppy also brings a sense of urgency and uncertainty to the fic without stating it outright.

“… _the ocean was right there. Right below her. Just a step away. She just needed to take it. Just walk. Walk. Walk and swim. Or float. Or sink.”_

Subtlety is everything, folks.

At this point, I had decided to call it a day. It was already nine and I needed to go to bed at a reasonable time so I could wake up tomorrow for work, but of course, because I hated myself, I called it a day but didn’t turn off my laptop.

This is where things kind of get hazy, guys. I don’t remember much of my process because I think I was brain dead at that point. From what I do remember is that I was stuck on the setting. From what I already had written down, it looked like this fic could go one of two ways: this takes place during Descendants 2 when Mal leaves to the Isle or after Descendants 2 where Mal regrets leaving the Isle. It came down to which one would be more devastating, so the latter one obviously.

But once again, I wanted there to be something for Ben, and those two options were too cruel on him. Of course, that’s what this fic was turning out to be, but I was in denial. I needed something happy. I couldn’t be the writer that only writes sad endings.

So I reread what I had and noticed that I could shift my focus from Harry to the ocean, give Mal a Moana moment. From that point, it honestly came pretty easily. Mal had said in that the barrier was surrounding the island so that’s why she couldn’t swim, so I wondered if she ever had the urge to swim. Like I said, Moana moment. I didn’t want to make the urge so obvious, though. I didn’t want to explicitly state that she wanted to touch the ocean because that’s basic, so I focused on the barrier at first.

With the first memory, I was able to tackle several different aspects of the Isle and Mal’s time there:

  1. It gave a bit more insight of the grittiness found on the Isle – which is something I love to write about. As a kid, I read _Lord of the Flies_ and ever since then, I’ve been obsessed with savage civilizations. It might be a little too crazy for the Isle, but oh well. Creative license.
  2. How desperate Mal was for her mother’s approval. That was obvious.
  3. Uma and Mal’s hatred. Also obvious.
  4. Mal’s own mental health. It’s the main focus of this fic, but I honestly had no plans to put any suicidal thoughts into it. It wasn’t until the line _“Her, a villain, wanted to escape and the barrier, a method that prevents villains from ever coming to Auradon, was happy to assist her. One less villain to worry about”_ popped into my head. It just kind of happened.



I liked giving the barrier some sort of intelligence. I think it’s so one-dimensional in the movies, like Kenny Ortega was just like, “You know what? Let’s add a barrier so they won’t escape and never mention anything about the actual composition of the barrier. It’s just there for convenient plot purposes.” No. I refuse to believe that it’s that simple, so I wanted to make it an enemy of Mal’s. Really, I think every villain hates the barrier, so I needed to make it a horrible thing. Euthanasia and assisted suicide wasn’t what I had planned, but that’s how it came out.

(P.S. I’ve actually been thinking of doing a fic from the point of view of the barrier. I’m not sure how or what I’m going to write about, but it’s in my head and I’ve stated it. No going back now.)

Since I finally figured out what the true monster was (the ocean and the barrier), it was pretty much easy flowing from there. I had good patches throughout the fic, so I just connected the dots. Along the way, I also decided on doing the present-past-present thing since I hadn’t really used that type of flow before. Sure, there was that one scene in “Fourteen” but I hadn’t committed to the idea until now.

It was when I was writing the second present scene, the one where she’s kissing Ben and the first hints of regret pop up, that I gravitated to the elements. Obviously, I’m writing about water, something Mal always wanted to reach which explained her relationship with Harry, but what about Ben? I thought about describing him as water too, but I felt that water was already too connotated with Harry. And of course, Harry and Ben are two completely different people, so I decided to write him as the ground.

_“No place she can sink in – just Ben and the trees and the ground./She hears a running creak nearby.”_

That last sentence was just a little flair I wanted to add, just a reminder to her that she can never escape the isle or the villain in her. Another pat on the back for me.

It was after that that I figured I could give Maleficent a small shout out. I assigned her fire, and of course, because I’m greedy, I added a little glimpse of her elusive father. I assigned him ice, and while it’s not an element, I wanted him to be the opposite of Maleficent.

So that left me with air which is conveniently located above the water, something it could never touch (and above as in ranked above because Harry’s kind of a tool and I mean that in the nicest way possible because he’s so cute). Plus, Mal turned into a dragon in the second movie, meaning she could fly.

After that, it all added up. I put some hints of the sky throughout the present day scenes (fireworks and air conditioning) before ending with her dreaming of clouds – with her finally finding out she can do much more than drown.

I ended up finishing a rough draft of the fic that night. At five in the morning. And I had to get up at eight.

I died at work, and when I got home, I died on my bed. I didn’t get to work on my fic until that weekend, two days later. The editing process usually kills me (which makes me wish I had a beta but, once again, I’m an awkward noodle who doesn’t like to inconvenience anyone), but this fic in particular wasn’t that much of a challenge. Just a few wording issues, but nothing major like a continuity error or reworking the flow of the story. It took me an hour, and eventually, I uploaded it on May 24, 2018.

Hope you guys liked it!


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